Three Apparitions

ONE

Wailing in a basin in a clearing in the bush,
she pulled me from the rusty water

and pressed my frigid body to her chest.
When I stopped crying, three grackles appeared

through the fog, readle-eaking
in harmony with everything.

She lay me in a bed of moss
and they alighted on the soft pith

of my chest, reared back their oil-slick necks,
and coughed their healing bile down my throat.

TWO

She walked across the driveway toward me
and when she got close she held me,

looked me in the eye and said,
it is so good to see you again.

I have been praying for you for years.
I woke a little teary in the faint tent light,

the waves driving through
gritty layers of beach and time.

THREE

In a muted grey pause between rainless
sheets of lightning, I bleed out into granite,

rip off my mask to taste fully
my final laboured breaths,

roll over and see her scan
the scattered horizon, the twisting

green sky, a wolf pup
hanging dumbly in her arms.